PSPDFKit 4.4 for iOS

We are happy to finally ship PSPDFKit 4.4 for iOS. This release comes as a new dynamic framework and includes many detailed improvements. It’s more than 1,000 commits more than PSPDFKit 4.3.5 for iOS.

Dynamic Framework

Since iOS 8, Apple added support for dynamic frameworks — Apple’s Building Modern Frameworks talk from WWDC 2014 is a great introduction. Some of the benefits of a dynamic framework are more stability, a smaller binary overhead, and faster app startup times. If you are already exclusively supporting iOS 8 then you should definitely make the switch.

Symbol Visibility and Nullability Annotations

We also took time to annotate our entire header set with symbol visibility to only export what you actually require. This change also makes the binary smaller and improves link times. While working on this, we did a large audit of our exported headers and did some house cleaning in many areas. It is now much easier to find the important framework classes.

Dashed Lines

We have had partial support for custom line dash styles for a while, but such support was not included in the Inspector. With the 4.4 release we have added complete line dash support as well as add a nice way to select it. We also did some other all around visual improvements in the Inspector as well.

Color Presets

While 4.3 had color presets for text, the 4.4 release now enables presets for almost all annotation types. This can be customized per type, using the typesShowingColorPresets property.

Vertical Scrobble Bar

It is now really easy to place the scrobble bar vertically. What previously required a good deal of custom code before, now runs out of the box.

Details

We have updated countless aspects on the framework including: making things prettier on the iPhone 6+; adding support for a few PDFs that are invalid but still work on Adobe Acrobat; made creating bookmarks programmatically simpler; improved accessibility; tweaked various animations (especially page to thumbnail); and of course squashed many bugs. Finally, we have begun development on PSPDFKit 5 for iOS, which is scheduled to be released some time in autumn.